When good ideas don't rise to the top

At an early startup in the late 2000s, we had this person who saw everything that needed fixing. Process gaps, product improvements, things no one else noticed. She’d make these detailed slides showing exactly what should change and why.

She wasn’t a product owner or VP. Just someone who cared deeply about making things better. When she showed me her work, I’d think “yeah, makes sense” and go back to executing. I wasn’t interested in strategy. I just wanted to ship.

Her ideas went nowhere.

I think about this from time to time. Should I have acted differently? Did the company really have that type of psychological safety (which wasn’t really a word yet)? I was part of the people that wrote the code that someone else told us to do.

As I grew to seniority I steadily understood that ideas and viewpoints were expected of me. Not just execution.

Startups sell this mythology that good ideas rise to the top. That flat structures mean everyone’s voice matters. But she was doing real strategic thinking that should have been someone’s full-time job, and it just evaporated because she didn’t have the title.

The waste wasn’t just her time. It was that the company actually needed what she was seeing. Someone should have been paying attention. Instead she kept making slides that disappeared into the void while people like me stayed focused on our own work.